Once they phase out analog cable, you'll probably see alot of that changing.
Alot of the newer equipment has alot of digital throughputs that avoid the whole tuner mess. Right now I go RF from my digital cable to the VCR, but then totally digital connections from there on.
I have one of the older digital cable boxes but I hear the newer ones have digital outputs too.
They also have the standard control inputs too so they should theoritically work with a TiVo like device.
What I still want is a huge splitter that divides all the channels into individual feeds that I can then stream to whatever TV I want.
The business model of most cable companies is dictated by the technologies of their time. The old, analog cable system was too poor to have proper safe guards to prevent theft, hence the stupid limits on cable boxes and such. Once the cable companies work out standards issues, you will probably see cable turn to more of a subscription service where you subscribe to a channel and can then access it on any of your registered devices. They will not have to worry about unauthorized use as before. The scary thing is that they will also probably track how much time you spend watching (or atleast receiving) a certain signal. This could be very interesting as far as privacy and such is concerned.
The standard for Digital Video (and digital cable) in the US is ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee). Because American business people are such pains in the ass, of course we are the only country in the world not using DVB. Many companies are not using ATSC or are using DVB because it is cheaper anyway so there is sort of mass chaos right now in America.
The FCC has no interest in phasing out analogy but does have interest in standardizing ATSC.
Your box doesn't request a channel, but rather a frequency range which carries multiple channels. It's actually, a bit more sophisticated than that though...
TiVo has a tuner, similiar to your cable box, but has no descrambling abilities (although it would be relatively easy to add if one had all the source available).
Analog cable is addressable. This means that the cable company sends a special signal to your box that helps your box unscramble the signal. Home-made (illegal) descramblers scan the signal to brute force the descrambling signal. It is not really true that the CO relies on a trusted client but rather on really pure encryption.
Digital cable is much the same, but more sophisticated. A much more advanced encryption algorthm is used and a public/private key system is used to control authentication.
Your digital cable box cannot decode channels it's not allow to see. You will also have a much harder time trying to brute force decrypt the channels.
I think your also confused about how tuners work. TiVos, cable boxes, and PC cards all have a single tuner (most of the time). The tuner can extract ONE channel from a cable stream. A software decoder could not decode one channel and let you watch another one.
Software decoders work reasonable well for analog cable systems but are just like normal descramblers. They do not work (and probably will _never_ work real-time) for digital cable.
Well, if you have a radeon, you can easily look at analog tv with the Xv extension. A relatively new video capture API has also recently been added (if they did it the way I think they did, it is through a v4l loopback device since the Xv interface really is incomplete and has no means for video capture). This interface could then be used to decode frames and display them to screen in pretty close to real time. The bitch is that the ATI cards do everything in CYV(sp) instead of RGB so it's a little different to search but the basic algorithm is this:
begin searching the first line for a 20 shade difference (color changes but it will always be about 20 shades lighter where that little bar is). Once you find that on the first line, it is reasonable to assume that on the next line, that same bar should be about that same position (there is a slight variance, but not much usually).
Use this as a basis to copy the data in to the video overlay area. The real question I guess is it possible to put the AIW cards in something other than overlay mode. You'll never succeed if you try to just go through normal displays to display the data. You'll need an overlay area. Since the AIW drivers are mostly in usermode implement through X, this means some X hacking (not very fun...).
The video capture stuff is relatively new and I haven't followed the project in quite some time but email me if you actually get anywhere on it...
Ah, no. Linux native partitions (83) if you want to support ext2 or any other fs.
DOS-type (6, e) partions will not support a linux filesystem.
I imagine your not referring to FAT32 (b, c) since that is in no way a DOS partition whereas FAT16 was just an extension of the original DOS filesystem much like the PE executable is just an extension of the MZ executable.
There is no reason why use shouldn't use ReiserFS. Performs just as well (for the most part) as ext2 and will improve uptime by eliminating nasty fscks in the event of a failure.
The more interesting question probably is what kernel should you be using????
Kudos to story posters for having so many dups today. Really keeping us on our toes huh?
Internally, windows is not smart enough to distigush between a top-level windows and a control. Therefore, I can say with some certainity, that there is no built in limit on top-level windows. So far, everyone is mentioning resource constraints and I'd have to agree with this.
well, fsck works for bttv type cards, not All in wonders so that's out of the question.
It's pretty simple to decode regular analog scrambled channels. One just has to search for the 20 shade bar and adjust the picture based on that.
Digital cables a whole nother mess. Digital cable is actually MPEG encoded. It uses a totally different frequency too so the normal tuners can't access these channels. I imagine that the cable company finally wised up and employes some form of encryption for the pay per view channels.
If each box has a private key, then the cable company can just encrypt the stream with access for only the cable boxes that have order it.
The truth is I am pretty sure they didn't do it this way but I'm sure it's something to that effect.
Similarly, your response regarding the copy protection protocol does not justify your actions.
Your discontinuation of "Format AIBO" is certainly a step in the right direction. However,
your site still contains information providing the means to circumvent AIBO-ware's copy
protection protocol constituting a violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital
Mellennium Copyright Act.
So, we can spell, but unfortunately, we haven't learned to read yet...
I know I'll get flamed for this, but Sony did have a right to respond to the fact that he was distributing backup copies of their software.
The DMCA bs was probably just because they were already pissed. I absolutely agree that the DMCA is wrong but this guy didn't help his cause by putting copyrighted software on his site.
You can't scream about unfair laws and then break the ones that are fair.
As to your accusations of my being a pretty big geek, or having a degree in physics, neither is true, actually. Ummmmmm, "I'm not a seismologist, but I play one on TV", OK?
Lighten up... It's a compliment, trust me. You've made some very interesting points. We could really speculate all days as to how the system is going to behave in the real world. I work for the Navy so this topic is particularly interesting to me.
I'll have to admit, my original post was almost fodder for someone to prove me wrong since my initial reaction was that a system such as this could never function in the real world due. The only thing I can equate it to is the arguments that must of been had when radar was being developed as to whether is was possible or not...
BTW: I did not even take the whole internet thing seriously... The comparision between the two mediums was almost asinine IMHO.
When security is a must, a locked-down environment is absolutely essential. This does not have to hurt productivity though.
I work for the DoD on a classified system so we are extremely locked down. I have never had a problem though because our IT department is extremely understanding. They know that we are developers and in general, know what we are talking about so anything that I need done, usually just takes a phone call. In fact, I have yet to have any legimate request denied.
It definitely prevents employees from installing games and stuff (which atleast to me, is a Good Thing (tm)), but I have never had a problem getting important stuff such as emacs and mozilla installed.
It's all about the amount of respect the IT department has for the developers and vice versa.
I have to say that your response is very well written and totally agree with it when speaking about a closed system. In a real world senario, one has to also consider turbulence. You speak of turbulence as something that is neglible because of it's tiny effects but it is quite important to realize that turbulence is a chaotic system and has the potential to behavior in a random manner.
I admit, it has a chance to work if the conditions can be construed to the point where the chaos is controlled and the system behaves in according to classical wave dynamics. This seems to me atleast to be unlikely (although I do not proclaim myself an expert) considering the desire to produce a "secure" communications channel.
This isn't a flame, just a discussion. You must either be a pretty big geek or have a degree in physics...
I do not doubt that the system could be used but I just dont seem to think that it could be used effectively as far as security is concerned.
Do you feel that this system would be as secure as they make it out to be? My whole point is that they are using turbulence to create security but turbulence IS CHAOTIC.
Ok, this article is not negative towards open source programmers, but to programmers as a whole. This guy has the nuts to say that most programmers don't handle error conditions very gracefully.
Unfortunately he is correct. There are a great deal of programmers that just do not know what they are doing. That's life though, and that's also why the goods ones get paid so well...
So lets encourage bad programmers to write lots of bugs so that the good programmers can get paid lots of money to be on tiger teams to fix the high priority problems introduced by the moron developers.
I should probably clarify too by addressing your point directly:)
I only disagree slightly with your statement. Reflect does not occur but diffraction should occur. This diffraction would be slight (probably too slight to detect) but is still a change in initial condition which would lead to the randomness predected by chaos theory.
As you may probably know, a chaotic system is different from a non-linear system. A non-linear system exhibits dependence on initial conditions but a chaotic system exhibits extreme sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
Since this system already exhibits extreme sensitive dependency on initial conditions in terms of the position of the receiver, it is safe to assume that variations in the interface are likely to cause similiar problems.
What needs to be realized is that the weather is no more chaotic than any other chaotic system. The difference is in the amount of iterations of the system before the deviances begins to show. A ton of work was done on this by Lorenz who was arguably the father of modern chaos theory.
Packet loss would occur because when these tiny factors become involved (which I imagine as more variable become different, the system becomes less stable) packets would have to be dropped and rebroadcasted if the system had any chance of working.
This system is trying to exploit chaos theory without taking in to account the problems it would impose. I am not saying that it is impossible, but not nearly as promising as it may seem to be.
While the system that governs this type of communication may not be as chaotic as say the weather, it definitely should have sensitive dependency on initial conditions.
Large amounts of packet loss would occur anytime a fish swims through the line of sight. My question is how sensitive is it to such things. My guess is that a minnow could render a message totally useless. I imagine that is what has kept the Navy from adopting such technology.
Considering that we only know the atmospheric content of 9 planets in the universe, I think it's safe to say that almost all planets have some sort of atmosphere:)
I've grown wary of using definitive words for things that we know very little about...
Evaporation occurs when water is a gas state is push up because it is lighter than the heavier atmosphere around it. If there were no atmosphere, then the water vapor would become the atmosphere.
I know what you are speaking of but that is all highly debatable. The ice that I believe you refer to has yet to be confirmed as water although it is strongly believed to be water. Even if there was ice, then there would technically be a thin layer of water on top of it (very good article about a year ago in Scientific American about the small film of water that makes ice slippery due to the instability of the lattice structure of ice crystals).
Slashdot Mirror
Once they phase out analog cable, you'll probably see alot of that changing.
Alot of the newer equipment has alot of digital throughputs that avoid the whole tuner mess. Right now I go RF from my digital cable to the VCR, but then totally digital connections from there on.
I have one of the older digital cable boxes but I hear the newer ones have digital outputs too.
They also have the standard control inputs too so they should theoritically work with a TiVo like device.
What I still want is a huge splitter that divides all the channels into individual feeds that I can then stream to whatever TV I want.
The business model of most cable companies is dictated by the technologies of their time. The old, analog cable system was too poor to have proper safe guards to prevent theft, hence the stupid limits on cable boxes and such. Once the cable companies work out standards issues, you will probably see cable turn to more of a subscription service where you subscribe to a channel and can then access it on any of your registered devices. They will not have to worry about unauthorized use as before. The scary thing is that they will also probably track how much time you spend watching (or atleast receiving) a certain signal. This could be very interesting as far as privacy and such is concerned.
The standard for Digital Video (and digital cable) in the US is ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee). Because American business people are such pains in the ass, of course we are the only country in the world not using DVB. Many companies are not using ATSC or are using DVB because it is cheaper anyway so there is sort of mass chaos right now in America.
The FCC has no interest in phasing out analogy but does have interest in standardizing ATSC.
Your box doesn't request a channel, but rather a frequency range which carries multiple channels. It's actually, a bit more sophisticated than that though...
TiVo has a tuner, similiar to your cable box, but has no descrambling abilities (although it would be relatively easy to add if one had all the source available).
Analog cable is addressable. This means that the cable company sends a special signal to your box that helps your box unscramble the signal. Home-made (illegal) descramblers scan the signal to brute force the descrambling signal. It is not really true that the CO relies on a trusted client but rather on really pure encryption.
Digital cable is much the same, but more sophisticated. A much more advanced encryption algorthm is used and a public/private key system is used to control authentication.
Your digital cable box cannot decode channels it's not allow to see. You will also have a much harder time trying to brute force decrypt the channels.
I think your also confused about how tuners work. TiVos, cable boxes, and PC cards all have a single tuner (most of the time). The tuner can extract ONE channel from a cable stream. A software decoder could not decode one channel and let you watch another one.
Software decoders work reasonable well for analog cable systems but are just like normal descramblers. They do not work (and probably will _never_ work real-time) for digital cable.
Well, if you have a radeon, you can easily look at analog tv with the Xv extension. A relatively new video capture API has also recently been added (if they did it the way I think they did, it is through a v4l loopback device since the Xv interface really is incomplete and has no means for video capture). This interface could then be used to decode frames and display them to screen in pretty close to real time. The bitch is that the ATI cards do everything in CYV(sp) instead of RGB so it's a little different to search but the basic algorithm is this:
begin searching the first line for a 20 shade difference (color changes but it will always be about 20 shades lighter where that little bar is). Once you find that on the first line, it is reasonable to assume that on the next line, that same bar should be about that same position (there is a slight variance, but not much usually).
Use this as a basis to copy the data in to the video overlay area. The real question I guess is it possible to put the AIW cards in something other than overlay mode. You'll never succeed if you try to just go through normal displays to display the data. You'll need an overlay area. Since the AIW drivers are mostly in usermode implement through X, this means some X hacking (not very fun...).
The video capture stuff is relatively new and I haven't followed the project in quite some time but email me if you actually get anywhere on it...
All these friggin ['s and ]'s.... Everybodies got to be original.
How is this any different from perl & tcl/tk? Couldn't the same be accomplished?
Don't think it will ever take off if you ask me...
Gotta have some 82... I don't care if you have a 1GB of memory. Swapping is so much fun!
Ah, no. Linux native partitions (83) if you want to support ext2 or any other fs.
DOS-type (6, e) partions will not support a linux filesystem.
I imagine your not referring to FAT32 (b, c) since that is in no way a DOS partition whereas FAT16 was just an extension of the original DOS filesystem much like the PE executable is just an extension of the MZ executable.
2. Configurable, though I've never found a need to do it, you can set the block sizes in Ext2 and 3 to optimize it for larger files or smaller ones
This is less a performance enhancement and more a hack because of the finite amount of available inodes in ext filesystems.
ReiserFS dynamically allocates inodes so such as hack is unnecessary. ext filesystems are no more configurable than ReiserFS.
In fact, one can make very few arguments for using ext over ReiserFS. As reiser matures, I don't think there will be any reason to use ext2.
Therefore partition type is quite different from what file system to use.
Besides, wasn't there just a story on Linux Advanced File Systems????
There is no reason why use shouldn't use ReiserFS. Performs just as well (for the most part) as ext2 and will improve uptime by eliminating nasty fscks in the event of a failure.
The more interesting question probably is what kernel should you be using????
Kudos to story posters for having so many dups today. Really keeping us on our toes huh?
Internally, windows is not smart enough to distigush between a top-level windows and a control. Therefore, I can say with some certainity, that there is no built in limit on top-level windows. So far, everyone is mentioning resource constraints and I'd have to agree with this.
well, fsck works for bttv type cards, not All in wonders so that's out of the question.
It's pretty simple to decode regular analog scrambled channels. One just has to search for the 20 shade bar and adjust the picture based on that.
Digital cables a whole nother mess. Digital cable is actually MPEG encoded. It uses a totally different frequency too so the normal tuners can't access these channels. I imagine that the cable company finally wised up and employes some form of encryption for the pay per view channels.
If each box has a private key, then the cable company can just encrypt the stream with access for only the cable boxes that have order it.
The truth is I am pretty sure they didn't do it this way but I'm sure it's something to that effect.
Similarly, your response regarding the copy protection protocol does not justify your actions.
Your discontinuation of "Format AIBO" is certainly a step in the right direction. However,
your site still contains information providing the means to circumvent AIBO-ware's copy
protection protocol constituting a violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital
Mellennium Copyright Act.
So, we can spell, but unfortunately, we haven't learned to read yet...
Sorry, I just had to.
I know I'll get flamed for this, but Sony did have a right to respond to the fact that he was distributing backup copies of their software.
The DMCA bs was probably just because they were already pissed. I absolutely agree that the DMCA is wrong but this guy didn't help his cause by putting copyrighted software on his site.
You can't scream about unfair laws and then break the ones that are fair.
As to your accusations of my being a pretty big geek, or having a degree in physics, neither is true, actually. Ummmmmm, "I'm not a seismologist, but I play one on TV", OK?
Lighten up... It's a compliment, trust me. You've made some very interesting points. We could really speculate all days as to how the system is going to behave in the real world. I work for the Navy so this topic is particularly interesting to me.
I'll have to admit, my original post was almost fodder for someone to prove me wrong since my initial reaction was that a system such as this could never function in the real world due. The only thing I can equate it to is the arguments that must of been had when radar was being developed as to whether is was possible or not...
BTW: I did not even take the whole internet thing seriously... The comparision between the two mediums was almost asinine IMHO.
When security is a must, a locked-down environment is absolutely essential. This does not have to hurt productivity though.
I work for the DoD on a classified system so we are extremely locked down. I have never had a problem though because our IT department is extremely understanding. They know that we are developers and in general, know what we are talking about so anything that I need done, usually just takes a phone call. In fact, I have yet to have any legimate request denied.
It definitely prevents employees from installing games and stuff (which atleast to me, is a Good Thing (tm)), but I have never had a problem getting important stuff such as emacs and mozilla installed.
It's all about the amount of respect the IT department has for the developers and vice versa.
I have to say that your response is very well written and totally agree with it when speaking about a closed system. In a real world senario, one has to also consider turbulence. You speak of turbulence as something that is neglible because of it's tiny effects but it is quite important to realize that turbulence is a chaotic system and has the potential to behavior in a random manner.
I admit, it has a chance to work if the conditions can be construed to the point where the chaos is controlled and the system behaves in according to classical wave dynamics. This seems to me atleast to be unlikely (although I do not proclaim myself an expert) considering the desire to produce a "secure" communications channel.
This isn't a flame, just a discussion. You must either be a pretty big geek or have a degree in physics...
I do not doubt that the system could be used but I just dont seem to think that it could be used effectively as far as security is concerned.
Do you feel that this system would be as secure as they make it out to be? My whole point is that they are using turbulence to create security but turbulence IS CHAOTIC.
Ok, this article is not negative towards open source programmers, but to programmers as a whole. This guy has the nuts to say that most programmers don't handle error conditions very gracefully.
Unfortunately he is correct. There are a great deal of programmers that just do not know what they are doing. That's life though, and that's also why the goods ones get paid so well...
So lets encourage bad programmers to write lots of bugs so that the good programmers can get paid lots of money to be on tiger teams to fix the high priority problems introduced by the moron developers.
I should probably clarify too by addressing your point directly :)
I only disagree slightly with your statement. Reflect does not occur but diffraction should occur. This diffraction would be slight (probably too slight to detect) but is still a change in initial condition which would lead to the randomness predected by chaos theory.
Extreme sensitive dependancy on initial conditions.
A.K.A The butterfly effect.
A butterfly flaps it's wings in Tokyo and it rains in New York.
A minnow swims in the sea and causes packet loss in an undersea communications channel.
It's chaos theory. A decent book (pretty good for the average Joe) is Chaos by James Gleick.
I am sure it is part of the book shelf of many slashdot geeks.
It's not just some silly thing that was mentioned on Jurassic Park, but a very true form of mathematics.
As you may probably know, a chaotic system is different from a non-linear system. A non-linear system exhibits dependence on initial conditions but a chaotic system exhibits extreme sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
Since this system already exhibits extreme sensitive dependency on initial conditions in terms of the position of the receiver, it is safe to assume that variations in the interface are likely to cause similiar problems.
What needs to be realized is that the weather is no more chaotic than any other chaotic system. The difference is in the amount of iterations of the system before the deviances begins to show. A ton of work was done on this by Lorenz who was arguably the father of modern chaos theory.
Packet loss would occur because when these tiny factors become involved (which I imagine as more variable become different, the system becomes less stable) packets would have to be dropped and rebroadcasted if the system had any chance of working.
This system is trying to exploit chaos theory without taking in to account the problems it would impose. I am not saying that it is impossible, but not nearly as promising as it may seem to be.
While the system that governs this type of communication may not be as chaotic as say the weather, it definitely should have sensitive dependency on initial conditions.
Large amounts of packet loss would occur anytime a fish swims through the line of sight. My question is how sensitive is it to such things. My guess is that a minnow could render a message totally useless. I imagine that is what has kept the Navy from adopting such technology.
Considering that we only know the atmospheric content of 9 planets in the universe, I think it's safe to say that almost all planets have some sort of atmosphere :)
I've grown wary of using definitive words for things that we know very little about...
BTW: Don't forget Io & Europa
That's just not true.
Evaporation occurs when water is a gas state is push up because it is lighter than the heavier atmosphere around it. If there were no atmosphere, then the water vapor would become the atmosphere.
I know what you are speaking of but that is all highly debatable. The ice that I believe you refer to has yet to be confirmed as water although it is strongly believed to be water. Even if there was ice, then there would technically be a thin layer of water on top of it (very good article about a year ago in Scientific American about the small film of water that makes ice slippery due to the instability of the lattice structure of ice crystals).